In Tejumola Olaniyan's study of modern African American and Afro-Caribbean drama, Scars of Conquest, Masks of Resistance (1995), he explains that a useful way to understand the force of change that black writers have engineered in American cultural life is to note the way that playwrights such as Derek Walcott, Ntozake Shange, and Amiri Baraka illustrate that "social relations have no essence, transhistorical or axiomatic, but are always paradigmatic, arbitrary, contextual--in short, historical.

When asked what prompted her to write her memoir How I Became Hettie Jones, the poet and one time wife of Amiri Baraka (Leroy Jones) said that she wanted people to know that even before the women's movement of the '70s, she and other women had "removed themselves from general cultural expectations .

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